Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I'm on furlough today - my first furlough day on a teaching day. For any non-Californians reading this, the CSU faculty are required to take 9 furlough days each semester this year; unlike faculty in the University of California system, we are allowed to schedule ours on days when we teach (i.e., we can cancel classes), though we were still required to get approval of our furlough schedule from our department chairs. After a lot of agonizing, I decided to take three of my nine days on teaching days and I scheduled them on the days prior to the three midterms in my Principles class. That might sound odd, since this would presumably be when my students would most need me around but I have always used the class meeting before an exam to do an in-class review session; I figured that by canceling those, students would need to do more work on their own but I wouldn't actually have to cut anything from the curriculum of the course. Unfortunately, since I scheduled my furlough days ar...

I've been waffling about joining the gym at school - I used to belong, let my membership lapse when I went on sabbatical, and haven't re-started it, though I am incredibly out of shape. I keep saying, "I really need to get back in shape" so recently a friend asked, "Why don't you just bite the bullet and join the gym? Then you'll have extra motivation to go since you'll already be paying for it." I laughed and explained that unfortunately, this is one of those times when I think too much like an economist - most people would think as my friend does, that paying the monthly fee would give me an additional incentive to go, but as an economist, I think about the fact that once I've paid the monthly membership fee, it's a sunk cost. Whether I actually go use the gym or not, the fee will be charged to my credit card, so simply paying the fee will have no impact on my decision to go to the gym on any given day. The marginal cost of going to t...

Considering how much time I spend talking in front of large groups of people, you would think that I would eventually stop being nervous about it. And for the most part, I am way more comfortable than I used to be; for example, I no longer rehearse my conference presentations word-for-word in front of the hotel mirror the morning of my session (well, not word-for-word anyway). But I'm still waiting for the semester when I don't feel really, really nervous before my first class meetings (and I'm talking 'think I need to go throw up' nervous). And it's not just because I have 500 students - I get this way before my smaller classes too. The thing is, I know that as soon as I walk in and start talking, I'll be fine; it's not like I'm imagining some disaster that I won't be able to handle, or I think the students will totally hate me. But knowing that I'll be fine doesn't seem to diminish how nervous I am beforehand. I suppose, in some ways,...